Suez Whiting

The Suez Whiting is one of those fish people catch from the shore and are left holding a question. It looks like nothing familiar, it has no old name, and no grandparent remembers it. For a very good reason: fifty years ago it did not exist in the Mediterranean.

The body is elongated and almost cylindrical in cross section, not deep and slab sided. The snout is pointed and conical, with a small mouth at the tip, and the profile of the head above the eyes is close to straight. The eyes are large. The back is light brown to olive and the whole flank is clean silver.

Three marks separate it from anything else you will catch in shallow water:

The second dorsal fin. It has two dorsal fins. The first is short and spiny, with 11 spines. The second is long and low and runs along almost the whole of the rest of the back, with 21 soft rays, sitting directly opposite the anal fin.

The tail. It is forked, and the edges of both lobes are black. That black margin is the quickest field mark.

The yellow fins. The pectoral, pelvic and anal fins carry a yellowish tint that stands out against the silver body.

The truth is that it resembles no native Mediterranean fish. There is no other member of its family here, and that is precisely why it ends up nameless in the hands of whoever catches it.

If it recalls anything, it is the Sand Smelt, through the silver colour and the two dorsal fins. But a sand smelt is far smaller, carries a broad bright silver band along its flank, and its second dorsal is short. A small Barracuda also has an elongated silver body, but is told apart at once by its jutting lower jaw and visible teeth, and by two short dorsal fins set well apart.

What to call it. It has no established Greek name. Neither official nor colloquial. It reached Greek waters only within the last decade, so it never had time to pick up a name from fishermen, and it does not appear on the official list of commercial names. Here we write it as Sillago, after its scientific name. If you catch one and have no idea what to call it, that is not your fault.

This is a fish of the sand. It lives over shallow sandy bottoms, on open beaches, on sandbars and in sheltered bays.

What is striking is how shallow it stays. The recorded depth range reaches 40 metres, but in practice most fish are caught between one and two metres. The two fish of the first Greek record were taken at 2 metres, and the fish of the first Turkish Aegean record in one to two metres, from the shore. It is literally a fish of the water around your ankles.

It moves in schools. Like every member of its family, when disturbed it buries itself in the sand and vanishes. If you have ever seen a shadow disappear into the bottom while wading in the shallows, this is very likely what it was.

It feeds on benthic invertebrates, meaning animals that live in and on the sand.

Its main food is polychaete worms, the very ones we use as bait. Crustaceans make up a smaller share. Stomachs of fish in this family have also been found to contain small molluscs, bivalves and hermit crabs.

The small mouth at the tip of that pointed snout is exactly the right tool for the job. The fish works over the sand and pulls out whatever is hiding underneath.

This also explains why it is caught so readily on natural bait. A piece of worm lying on the sand is precisely what it eats anyway.

The spawning season runs from April to September. In the study carried out off Port Said, both sexes were found ripe in September, while the first juveniles of 6 and 7 centimetres appeared in November. Water temperature appears to be what triggers spawning.

The sex ratio is close to balanced, with females slightly ahead. There is an interesting pattern by size, though: among smaller fish of 12 to 16 centimetres, males dominate, while among larger fish of 17 to 19 centimetres, females dominate. In other words, females reach the greater sizes.

It is easily caught from the shore, on light tackle with a small hook and a piece of worm lying on the sand. The fish of the first Turkish Aegean record was taken with a rod from the beach, on chicken as bait.

In the commercial fisheries of the eastern Mediterranean it turns up mainly in bottom trawls. In Egypt it was first recorded within the discarded portion of the catch, but researchers describe it as a species of economic importance and regard its establishment as a positive development for the local fishery. Along the Turkish coast its abundance is rising rapidly.

The family it belongs to, the sillaginids, are well regarded food fish throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean region, where they are fished commercially. Its small size does mean you need a good number of them for a plate.

In Greece and Cyprus it has no commercial value and does not appear on the official list of commercial names, which is to be expected for a species described in 2013 that reached Greek waters within the last decade.

This fish has two stories worth telling. One is how it arrived, the other is how we discovered it was not what we thought.

How it arrived. It is a Lessepsian species, meaning it crossed into the Mediterranean from the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. Its route was recorded step by step: Lebanon 1977, which is the first Mediterranean record, Israel 1985, Turkey and Egypt 1994. Cyprus followed. It then began working north: on 9 July 2018 a single fish was caught with a rod from the shore in Gökova Bay, Turkey, in the southern Aegean. And finally it reached Greek waters.

The first Greek record came from Rhodes, where a recreational angler caught two fish at a depth of 2 metres. It was published in 2019 in the journal Mediterranean Marine Science. This is a fish that entered the Greek fauna only a handful of years ago.

How we discovered it was a different species. For 36 years everyone assumed the Mediterranean population was Sillago sihama, a widespread Indo-Pacific species. Then in 2013 Golani, Fricke and Tikochinski examined the fish using DNA analysis and found strong genetic divergence from the Hong Kong and southern Red Sea populations. It was a different species, one that had never been named. They described it as Sillago suezensis, after the canal it came through.

There is a visible difference too: the tail of Sillago suezensis is markedly forked, while that of Sillago sihama is squared off. So if you come across older references to Sillago sihama in the Mediterranean, they are in fact describing this fish.

The status of the species. On the IUCN Red List it is Not Evaluated (NE). That means neither that it is at risk nor that it is safe, only that it has not been assessed yet, and the reason is practical: the species was described just in 2013. The available figures point to a species under no pressure at all. Its resilience is rated high, with a population doubling time of under 15 months, and its vulnerability score is 22 out of 100, which is low. In the Mediterranean the situation is in fact the opposite of threatened, as its population is growing and the species is expanding northwards.

There are no native sillaginids in the Mediterranean. So if you are holding a sillago in the eastern Mediterranean, this is it.